Foobot air quality monitor

Most of us only hear about the air quality when busy city centers exceed legal limits

But what about the air you breathe inside your home? There's a growing market of smart devices that keep tabs to monitor the air inside your home — with some that react to automatically protect the quality of the air you breathe.This week it's the turn for Foobot, another app-powered, Alexa-ready air quality monitor to, hopefully, help you breathe easy. Foobot's design lends itself to being tidied away into a corner, rather than left more prominently on display, like Awair.

Foobot alerts you when a pollution spike occurs

Foobot alerts you when a pollution spike occurs, along with the type of pollutant and how much pollution you’re dealing with. Connect the dots. Have you introduced a new product into your home? A new behavior? Nip it in the bud thanks to Foobot.No need to have a PhD to understand your air. Foobot compiles the data collected from its four sensors.

Then, it assembles an overall score that reflects the air quality index of your home on a scale from 0 to 100.Foobot works seamlessly with Google Nest smart thermostats. In most U.S. homes, Nest connects to the HVAC system. Foobot can then take over the ventilation system and control airflow renewal based on real-time pollution measurements. 

More functional than fashionable

The device isn't ugly, but its white finish and slatted design makes the gadget look like a piece of plumbing, or perhaps an air freshener. Personally, I'm not sold on the Foobot's looks. However, it is small, compact and can be hidden away if you don't want the device out on display.

Like Awair, the companion smartphone app offers much more information than the device itself. Foobot turns colors depending on the quality of the air: the light is either blue for good or orange for bad, and how far up the device the light stretches from its base determines the magnitude of positivity or negativity.

If any one measure spikes drastically, the app invites you to make a note explaining why

You might have been cooking, had a lot of people in the same room, or were using cleaning products nearby. Like Awair, Foobot's app offers tips for improving your air quality. These serve up fairly obvious advice: Opening your windows when cooking, or after using cleaning products. These suggestions also seem to have been done on the cheap — the grammar and punctuation can sometimes be a little strange. Away from the slightly amateurish-sounding tips, the Foobot's app interface is clean, attractive and simple enough to navigate, but somehow lacks some of the Awair's polish.

More advice is offered by Foobot via a free 42-page ebook available on its website

Also like Awair, Foobot can talk to other smart home gadgets via IFTTT (If This Then That). Once set up — a matter of creating a free IFTTT account and linking it to your Footbot account — you can configure the air quality monitor to automatically flash Philips Hue lights to alert you about degrading air quality. Foobot can also create a Google spreadsheet to log any spikes in air quality readings, switch on ventilation via a Nest or Ecobee thermostat, and activate a Blueair air purifier. More smart home support comes in the form of Amazon Alexa, which can be paired with the Foobot. 

Alexa tried to use Food Bot

When it worked, the Foobot app would say my air quality was poor/good/great, then add a message like "Have a safe breathing day". I'm not even sure what that's supposed to mean. If air quality is poor, Alexa will invite to say "tips" which cues her to read a tip from the Foobot app. One of these explains how cooking lowers nearby air quality.

This means you can say to Alexa: "Ask Foobot about my air quality" or "Ask Foobot about the air quality in my lounge/kitchen/bedroom" depending on where your Foobot is placed. This worked most of the time, but Alexa sometimes thought I was asking about Food Bot, a completely different Alexa Skill available from the Alexa app.